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Mozilla wants to put Firefox in your virtual reality headset

Oculus Rift virtual reality headset
The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset.
Image Credit: Oculus

Mozilla wants your virtual headset to access the web, and so the company announced that it will start adding VR capabilities directly into its “Firefox Nightly” developer release channel.

As Mozilla engineering director Vlad Vukicevic said in a blog post:

Previously, users and content creators had to download a separate build of Firefox. This one-off build usually lagged behind ongoing development. From now on, VR capabilities will be developed alongside other continuous Firefox improvements.

Vukicevic also describes how Oculus Rift developers can get WebVR — a Javascript API that provides access to virtual reality devices — onto their headsets, which requires an add-on. However, he adds that “this functionality may be bundled directly with Firefox, or provided by Oculus Runtime itself” in the future.

Firefox Nightly provides a collection of testing builds for Firefox, which are continuously updated with developer feedback.

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